I couldn't agree more with the sentiment that Lightroom doesn't feel like an Adobe product because it just works so well (barring speed issues that crop up on some machines). The purchase process for Lightroom 3 a year or two ago, however, was a stark reminder of who I was dealing with.
I purchased an education license online, going through the convoluted student status verification process (which was incredibly unintuitive at times, e.g. I had to open a support ticket to request verification). After I put in the payment details, I was told that the purchase was successful, and that I should be expecting the license key in my e-mail shortly. Few weeks pass with no e-mail, and no indication that anything had gone wrong, so I called them up. Turns out they had never received the payment, and the representative on the phone actually made me go through my bank transactions to verify that the transfer didn't take place, rather than confirming it on their end. Finally, I just gave up and used a pirate version until the version 4 beta became available. I hope the process goes smoother when version 4 becomes available for purchase.
Lightroom 4 is available to purchase now, but the buying process is still unintuive (at least as far as the education verification process is concerned). In a moment of madness I decided go for the physical copy, but that just yielded a ridiculous level of nested packaging for what was just a cd in a sleeve with a key stuck to the back.
I purchased an education license online, going through the convoluted student status verification process (which was incredibly unintuitive at times, e.g. I had to open a support ticket to request verification). After I put in the payment details, I was told that the purchase was successful, and that I should be expecting the license key in my e-mail shortly. Few weeks pass with no e-mail, and no indication that anything had gone wrong, so I called them up. Turns out they had never received the payment, and the representative on the phone actually made me go through my bank transactions to verify that the transfer didn't take place, rather than confirming it on their end. Finally, I just gave up and used a pirate version until the version 4 beta became available. I hope the process goes smoother when version 4 becomes available for purchase.